Friday, 20 September 2013

Today we tested the use of green screen and how to use it.
I learnt how to delete the back drop so that the person we recorded looks like they are swimming.
This is what we made:
we leant that if we record to close to the green screen the reflection will bounce onto the person creating the pixel effect in the video.

Music videos are essentially promotional devices whose function is to sell the song to its target audience.
For example in 'Bite My Tongue' by You Me At Six (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1CTbE3u0PQ). The audience will want to see guitars, Drums, Close Ups of the singer and them all preforming.

As an artist is a brand they have to have an identity established through their videos.
In this video you could say that the band are trying to break away from their identity from the fun rebellious rock group (shown in the first image below ) to the darker and heavier rock band (image under the first one).

To appeal to their target market, record lables will demand close ups of the stars for their audience to recognise with. They do this by collaborating with Oli Sykes (lead singer of Bring me the Horizon). In the video Oli is used as a threat so is given a lot of close ups and is in control of the editing.

Saturday, 14 September 2013

Goodwin said that music videos demonstrate genre characteristics (e.g. stage performance in metal videos, simple dance routine for boy/ girl bands, aspiration in hip hop).
I researched into Soft Rock bands and what conventions are the same between a selection of videos.
this is what I found:

- A lot of close ups of instruments and faces.

- have a narrative structure to them

- they tend to interact more with the audience (eg looking into the camera)

As I was the director I had to set every member of my group
with a role, from props and costume to being in control of the camera. This
wasn’t that hard as everyone didn’t mind what part they had to play, so I was
able to designate a role to every group member. With this everything came back
to me for a final check. When the story board was handed to me it was good
because it had all the requirements that a story board needs (shots, times,
lyrics, cinematography). I was in charge of doing the shot list which, in
hindsight, I should have got someone else with less to do to complete because I
had a lot of work looking over and helping other people that the shot list was
rushed and we had to change it on set. One of the tasks that the whole group
got involved with was creating a Facebook page asking people to be the class
and the crowed outside. This didn’t work as we were shooting on the Wednesday
and set the page up on the Monday, so most people were already busy. If we had
more time though I feel that this method would have been effective. The final
part of the planning for this video was to sort out props and costume, this was
not done effectively as the person in charge of props and costume asked
everyone to bring old school uniform, but only me and a couple of others did,
so we didn’t have enough for a crowed.

I really enjoyed the production task because most of the
time things ran smoothly and we managed to get the shots we needed in time with
the shot list. However as in every production things are going to wrong, the
main thing being continuity. This happened a lot in the classroom scenes, as we
were using people who don’t do Media, so they were available for some of the
shots but not for others. When I come to do my real music video I will try to
use as few people as possible and if I do need a lot of people make sure I get
all the shots on the day that everyone is there, this way I won’t have to
reschedule to do one shot. This happened when we were outside and in one shot
we have a crowed of 6ft tall guys and in the next shot we have 3 girls. Despite
this I do think that we did well in the production and stuck to our time table.

While we were in production we did use a
number of Digital Technology. One of which was, of course, the Digital Camera.
Without the use of the digital camera I would not have been able to get the
quality of picture that we did. Another
use of digital technology was to use the projector to play the video for the
lighting and also for the sound so that the actors could sing along.

At the editing stage I learned a lot of new techniques, as I
have never used Adobe Premier Plus. Even basic things like trimming a clip I
improved on and was able to get the clip exactly how I wanted (in the end).

I also learned how to
finalise a clip to make the video flow better. The red bar at the top means the
video hasn’t been finalised and creates a jumpy image, which looks really
bad.

I found that in a few
of the shots the lighting was to dark so I used the shadow/highlight tool which
made the shots brighter so that we could see the actor singing.

The other useful tool that I found was the unlink tool which
meant that we could unlink the sound from the video, this was a benefit because
it meant that we could the real music from the song played instead of our
dreadful singing.

In all I feel that I have had a good experience in my first
attempt at a music video but I will need to take the thing that I did wrong in
to consideration when I come to my final piece and learn from the mistakes that
I made in this experience.